New Shrewsbury, NJ Aerial Taxi Crashes, Jan 1967

New Shrewsbury, N. J. (AP) -- Federal and state aviation inspectors sifted through the charred wreckage of a twin-engine Beechcraft air taxi that plunged into a snow-covered field minutes after takeoff Thursday from Red Bank Airport. All nine persons aboard were killed.
"We don't know what went wrong. Anything could have happened," said Col. FRANCIS GERARD, chief of the State Bureau of Aeronautics. "All we do know is that the left wing hit ground first, the plane cartwheeled and then flipped over." It then burst into flames.
Investigators from the Civil Aeronautics Board were at the scene, a field about 250 yards west of the airport, late into the day.
Meanwhile, the grim task of identifying the victims continued, hampered authorities said, by the charred condition of the bodies.
The plane, the first scheduled flight of the day, took off shortly before 7 a.m. and was due at Kennedy International Airport in New York 20 minutes later.
The time of the crash -- 6:58 a.m. -- was determined by the stopped clock found intact in the cockpit of the plane.
Although the plane burst into flames, witnesses said a wing-tank full of fuel was intact.
"There's nothing left of the body of the plane or the passengers but ashes," one witness said.